AMHF 005 – Presenting Your Offer – AKA – Your Advertisement

Everyone is looking for the perfect, magical aviation advertisement that persuades everyone to accept an offer or buy a product.

But more often than not, it’s not the advertisement itself that impacts the purchase decision.

Luckily, it iS something you can influence – the timing and frequency with which you present your offer!

Why do I have to keep repeating my ad?

“Why do I have to repeat my ad so many times and in so many different ways? Can’t I just present my offer to a customer once and be done with it? If he wants it, he’ll buy. If he’s not interested, then there’s no reason to keep bugging him.”

I’ve had this conversation (and variations on the theme) with just about every single client we’ve ever worked with- in Aviation, Finance, Education, and every other field.

And Aviation is the worst.

Why do ads need to repeated?

Three important reasons:

You don’t have the prospect’s complete attention the first time they “see” your ad.

The timing isn’t good for him.

Your prospect isn’t convinced you’re credible (yet.)

The attention span of a goldfish?

About the first point – advertisers lament that people have the attention span of a goldfish. We think that’s just insulting. People have as long of an attention span as they choose to have, but they do have a lot of information competing for that attention.

Jerry Seinfeld said it very well in an interview with the Wall Street Journal:

WSJ: Do consumers have that long an attention span?

Mr. Seinfeld: There is no such thing as an attention span. There is only the quality of what you are viewing. This whole idea of an attention span is, I think, a misnomer. People have infinite attention if you are entertaining them.

We would add – “as long as you’re entertaining OR educating them about a topic they’re interested in!”

But, the fact remains that you have to acquire their attention first, when there are MUCH more entertaining options just seconds or clicks away, whether you’re advertising in a magazine, online, by direct mail, or at a trade show. Just because they’ve glanced your way doesn’t mean they’ve digested your message and analyzed it thoroughly.

Timing isn’t good

Even if you present an attractive offer, people don’t drop whatever they’re doing and buy an airplane because they saw your ad. (Or take their plane in for service, or switch insurance companies, or change the workflow of how they provide service to THEIR cusotmers.)

Aviation is a necessarily complex field, and aviation professionals are necessarily cautious people. Sales cycles vary, but the typical expecation is eight months plus for complex products. The size of the prospect’s company, the size of the transaction, the number of people, departments or processes affected by the change all lengthen the cycle.

The prospect isn’t convinced you’re credible (yet)

We talk about the “villain curve” in this week’s podcast.

The fact that you’re selling something initially positions you as the “villain” of the story in your prospect’s head.

Protesting that you’re “not a salesperson,” or “not trying to sell you something” only makes you sound MORE disingenuous than he assumes you are.

We talk about a “learning curve” in which we have to plan extra time into a project for people to learn a new technology or skill. In sales and marketing, we need to plan extra time to get past the “villain curve.”

The only way to get past the “villain curve” is to:

Be honest and clear in your communications.

Have frequent, non-villainous interactions with the prospect.

Let time pass.

There is not magic here. In fact, the more “techniques” you apply, the more manipulative you appear to a smart prospect.

Our best advice is to “embrace your inner villain,” realize that’s how the prospect sees you simply because of your position, not take it personally, and continue to be your friendly, helpful self with your agenda open on the table in front of you.

John Williams To help all you ladies and gents sell more products and services.

Paula Williams Absolutely, so to tell you a little bit more.

You may be new to the podcast, so we wanted to take a couple of minutes today and tell you a little bit more about John and I and where we get all this stuff. We don’t just make it up. We don’t just sit here in our office talking to each other.

We actually belong to a whole bunch of marketing and or aviation groups. We probably spend, what?

John Williams Oh, 10 to $20,000 a year on education.

Paula Williams Yeah, education, mastermind groups and other kinds of things. So all kinds of associations, MBAA, AOPA, Helicopter Association International and so on like that and aviation.

John Williams And marketing groups that are international scopes so that we can keep up with the latest and greatest stuff so we can pass it along.

Paula Williams Exactly, so we go fairly frequently to things like Infusionsoft University, Sandler training, we’ve done their leadership club, or their president’s club actually is what they call it.

The PMI, Project Management Institute, we’re certified, or I’m a certified PMP. And John’s done the David Eccles School of Business, that was quite an experience.

John Williams Of course. And after I got out of there then I learned marketing.

Paula Williams [LAUGH] It was the International MBA, where they did one or two classes on marketing.

John Williams I think there were two possibly.

Paula Williams Right, and then of course we belonged to the GKIC insider circle and we’re in the peak performer’s group. That’s Lee Milteer’s group, so shout out to Lee, thank you for everything. Right, so we don’t just come up with this stuff.

Actually what we do is we sort through an awful lot of material. We probably read 50 books a year, and we also learn from other people in other industries about different things that people do with good or bad results. And learning from other people and then distilling it down to what really works in the aviation industry with our clientele.

And we have a group of full service clients, and we also teach the Aviation Marketing Master Class.

John Williams You’re looking at me like you want me to say something.

Paula Williams [LAUGH] Well, what would you like to add?

John Williams You did well.

Paula Williams Okay, all right. Well I wouldn’t want to be known for talking too much.

You have to do your side of the thing, so anyway, so today’s episode, back to our regularly scheduled program. As you know campaigns are composed of three parts, we’ve got the list, the offer and the presentation, right?

John Williams Absolutely, forever and ever.

Paula Williams [LAUGH] Okay. So, in the last couple of episodes, we talked about the list and the offer.

So, today we’re gonna talk about the presentation which is really where the rubber meets the road. And in marketing textbooks, this is really called an, what, an advertisement.

John Williams [LAUGH]

Paula Williams So this is where you present your offer to your list.

John Williams Mm-hm.

Paula Williams How convenient is that.

So first a little story about how we met.

John Williams Well, this is your game you start the story.

Paula Williams [LAUGH] Okay. So John and I actually met several years ago. We met in the 90s. We were working for different consulting firms, actually competing consulting firms at a financial institution.

And if you remember anything about financial institutions in the 90s, they were not the warmest and fuzziest of environments, right?

John Williams Precisely.

Paula Williams [LAUGH] So, the consulting firms, we were actually competing for some of the same projects. And in my experience with other consultants they are very, very quick to throw each other under the bus in an effort to keep the contract, get the contract, do whatever they wanted to do.

And so when I met John, my first thought is here is a fearsome competitor.

John Williams Now I never did that, did I?

Paula Williams [LAUGH] No, you didn’t, but that’s the implication by position. Basically you were in the position of being somebody that if I were seen having a cup of coffee with you, my consulting firm would go completely crazy and wonder what I was up to.

John Williams Yeah, well whatever.

Paula Williams These were the days of vast conspiracies of corporate takeovers and crazy stuff happening in the banking industry. So, weird things, right.

John Williams Mm-hm.

Paula Williams Okay, so John was the bad guy by position. Not through any fault of his own. But in the months that followed, after working together on projects and seeing each other every day, his position started to shift because my experience with him was that he was not only not throwing me under the bus, which he had every opportunity to do.

He was also acting in a very honorable way, and speaking well of me to his colleagues and other folks which is just unheard of.

John Williams Including the bank.

Paula Williams [LAUGH] Right. It’s just unheard of in the industry. So building credibility took a long time just because of that position but it can be done.

And we ended up working together, doing really good work.

John Williams Yeah they decided that I was gonna be running a project or two and they put her on the project with me. And we had good times.

Paula Williams Exactly, we got really good results. In fact the bank manager that we worked for said that he got more than his money’s worth out of us every time he put us on a project together.

Paula Williams And eventually we ended up dating and married.

John Williams [LAUGH]

Paula Williams And starting a company together, so.

John Williams Who knew?

Paula Williams You never know what’s gonna happen. But the point is some of the best relationships, especially in complex situations like [LAUGH] dating, marriage, and starting companies, and even other things like that.

In some situations, in dating, marriage, companies, other kinds of things, depending on the complexity of things, the longer it’s gonna take to build up the level of trust you need to make that happen.

John Williams Yes, and as a matter of fact, I try to get the team together every evening, just to go out for a cup of coffee, nothing more, no alcohol.

And she refused to go with us for about nine months or more, of course, she decided it was okay to have a cup of coffee with the team.

Paula Williams Right, well, with the enemy, as I saw it, but again, it’s a matter of positioning. So it works out, and so on.

So rule number one, there is a point to this story, rule number one of campaign presentations is. [SOUND] Rule number one of campaign presentations is that you’re going to need more than one approach.

John Williams Yeah. Whatever.

Paula Williams And the reason why is because of what we call the villain curve.

Basically if somebody is positioned as I mean, just by virtue of selling something, you are the villain in the situation. So you have to just kind of embrace your inner villain, buckle in, and realize that it’s going to take some time, to get done what you need to get done, and to build that relationship.

So, one presentation, if you only approach someone once. That’s what we call a random act of marketing. If you just do a trade show, or just do one ad and say, eh, well, it didn’t work. My list is bad, my presentation is bad, my offer is bad. Not necessarily true.

John Williams No, you have to have an integrated marketing system. And those two words, system and integration, are key to a successful sales.

Paula Williams 00:08:49 Exactly, and in this case an integrated campaign, because you need to have your list, your offer, and your presentation together, but you also have to present it more than once, and advertise it in more than one way, so we’re gonna talk about that today.

So, another little story. I wish I could find an example that was aviation related, but hopefully everybody has an experience with growing tomatoes. Who doesn’t, right?

John Williams [LAUGH]

Paula Williams Okay. So a great customer list is like a tomato plant, okay? You have different tomatoes on the plant. Some of them are red.

Some of them are kind of yellowish green and some of them are like really green, and they all ripen at their own pace, so from summer to fall. If you’ve never had a tomato plant, you’ll just have to take my word for it. You go out every day and you look at your tomato plants and you’re going to have one, or two, or three, or five, or ten ripe tomatoes.

So you pick those and you leave the rest. And you keep watering your tomato plants, and you keep weeding and taking care of them. And every day you go out and there’s going to be one or three or five or ten, ripe tomatoes.

John Williams Dripping on them, as it were.

Paula Williams [LAUGH] Exactly. Which is great. And now a lot of people when they are working with sales and marketing and things like that. They think oh I need more leads, and that would be like going back to Home Depot and buying more tomato plants every day. That’s crazy.

You don’t need more leaves necessarily, you need to take care of the ones that you’ve got. Especially in aviation because we have a limited number of prospects. So, you nurture those prospects. You capture the ones that you can. And you just keep taking care of them. So, like in our yard we have six tomato plants, and we were able to feed the neighborhood, [LAUGH] with just about as many tomatoes as anybody could stand.

Just with those six tomato plants. So you just need to put out, and John actually is really good at this, he put together a drip watering system that gave them water whenever they needed it. And we fed them and weeded them, and went out once a week and really took care of them.

And just about every other day we’d go out and pick tomatoes, so you don’t need more plants in most cases. In a lot of cases in aviation marketing you don’t necessarily need more leads. A list of 500 or 1,000 might be all that you need, depending on the size of transactions, and the scope of your marketing effort.

And you may be able to make a really, really good living off of, in fact it’s much better to have a high quality list of 500 leads, than a list of 10,000 or 20,000 that don’t really know, like, or trust you.

Paula Williams Okay, so sometimes you’re gonna have special occasions where you’re going to need more tomatoes at one time.

Like for John’s birthday we want to throw a party, and it’s August 29th, so the height of tomato season, and we wanna get a bunch of tomatoes, so there are some ways that you can do that. You can cut back on the water, and you can consult a horticulture magazine and they’ll give you some ways of getting more tomatoes at one time.

And, same thing with marketing. There are some ways that you can get more customers to convert or more deals closed at a particular time, because of some additional effort that you put into your list. With me so far?

John Williams Of course.

Paula Williams Okay. [LAUGH] And then another thing is at the end of the season, of course you’re gonna have situations where maybe a a regulation is going to change, or something is going to happen that’s going to change the environment.

And when you’re growing tomatoes, that would be the end of the growing season, it’s going to freeze tomorrow. You go out there and you pick all the tomatoes that you can whether they’re green, yellow, orange, red, whatever color they are. Because this is your last chance. So, if that’s the case, and you have a product that has an expiration date and something like that, then you want to run some kind of a promotional effort to get as many of those, those leads closed as you can before the door closes.

So that’s an option as well. So how do you do that in real life? We know how to to do that with tomatoes now, but that’s not what we’re here for.

John Williams Talk about promotion versus lowering price.

Paula Williams Okay, yeah in the last podcast we talked about the three ways to create an irresistible offer.

And the three ways were increase value, reduce risk or reduce price. Right, and which ones are the best?

John Williams The first two, of course.

Paula Williams Exactly. Increasing your value or reducing your risk. So, you don’t want to have a fire sale and reduce your price, be spring loaded to the reduce your price position which a lot of people are.

You want to increase your value or reduce the risk in some way, if you can.

John Williams Or at least have a promotion if you must lower the price temporarily.

Paula Williams Exactly, and give them the reason why. Tell them this is changing at the end of the year, so we’re coming out with a new model so we’re closing out on our old models.

That’s a legitimate reason to reduce a price. So, how do we do this? How do we take care of those tomato plants, and how do we take care of our lists, in a way that is more likely to get us more sales, out of the situation?

John Williams Careful.

Paula Williams [LAUGH] Carefully. Okay, so we put together, and we put this in our downloads. We put this in our tip sheet. There is a.

Paula Williams Wow, okay. In our tip sheet, we put together a diagram of a campaign that shows a regular email going out once a week, a promotional email going out once a month, invitation postcards to an event, thank you postcards to an event.

Printed newsletter quarterly, having a landing pages, phone calls, and other things. So you really want to break it up into different ways of approaching that customer, because some people will never open your emails, but they’ll take a phone call from you or vice versa.

John Williams And as you, get more experience and more contacts with customers, you need to make notes in your CRM.

Paula Williams Mm-hm.

John Williams So that when, it comes time to do something again, what this customer likes and dislikes, and what you’ve talked to them about in the past.

Paula Williams Exactly, and never being one to waste a good metaphor, your CRM is kind of like your watering system for your tomatoes.

You put in, in fact you can write a whole bunch of emails, maybe tip of the week, or fact of the day, or something like that in one afternoon. Chop it into little pieces, put it in your CRM, and have that delivered over one a week. So we do our marketing Mondays.

Weirdly enough, I don’t sit up all night Friday night writing an article to go out on Monday morning. Typically those are done several at a time and then we schedule those out using our CRM software.

John Williams By the way, we live in a world of acronyms. CRM in aviation is typically cockpit resource management.

Paula Williams [LAUGH] True.

John Williams In our case, we’re marketing in aviation, and it’s called customer relationship management.

Paula Williams Exactly, so that would be like infusion software sales force. So hopefully you’re with us there. But, the point being, a lot of this can be automated. So you can plan out your campaign and spend several hours or several days putting together your marketing pieces and then just having those delivered over time either as advertisements in magazines, emails, direct mail, pieces ready to go into the, ready take to the post office on a specific day.

Your printed newsletter and so on, so you don’t have to be 24, 7 marketing. You can do this all at one time and then use the automation to help you space that out. Okay, so the tip sheet, just go to aviation marketing hangar flying episode five, and you can download that tip sheet, or you can get it from our website aviationbusinessconsultants.com.

And get that from the blog. But yeah you can download that tip sheet, and it will have an example campaign with lots of presentations, over a long period of time, and you can see how that works, and you can design your own by filling in the blanks on that.

Okay, so a lot of people are thinking this is a lot of work. These campaigns are ridiculous. [LAUGH] Have you thought that?

John Williams In a word? Yes.

Paula Williams Okay. [LAUGH] Exactly. Why is it so hard?

John Williams I give up. Why is it so hard?

Paula Williams Oh, of course you know why it’s so hard.

It’s because you’re positioned as the bad guy. If you’re selling something, you have to take the time to build credibility. And really, what a campaign does [SOUND]. Really what a campaign does, is it gives you the opportunity to interact with people over a long period of time, and build up that trust.

So you really do want to make sure that you do that correctly and not rush things. We call that the villain curve right?

John Williams Oh it’s the old, try to get you to go out for a cup of coffee thing again.

Paula Williams Exactly, right. So the positioning is everything.

If you’re positioned as the enemy, then that’s one thing. But if you over time, learn that somebody’s not out to get you, they actually do want to help you, really a campaign is designed to do just that. Let people know that you are not a terrible person. You really are there to help help them, and you have a resource that they really need.

So, speaking of resources that people really need, if you want a campaign done for you, we have a great resource. It’s our aviation marketing master class, and if you join during November we will actually walk through the process of developing a campaign for you on paper. And we’ll go through the process of developing your list, your offer and your presentation based on your product or service, your customers and everything custom for you.

Does that sound like a good deal?

John Williams Sure. Does that mean you’ll do mine for me?

Paula Williams [LAUGH] If you join the class I will.

John Williams Great.

Paula Williams Oh, you’re already in the class. And if you are already in the class, of course, just ask, because we wanna make sure that these bonuses are available to everyone.

And we wanna reward our loyal members, and things like that, so

John Williams And by the way not kidding, I have another company I run, so [LAUGH]

Paula Williams And you want, you want me to do it for you, don’t you?

John Williams Of course. [LAUGH]

Paula Williams Doesn’t everybody? No actually it’s, it actually is a really good idea to get some help with your first one.

We have saved an awful lot of time. John told you at the beginning of this podcast, how those groups that we are involved with save us a lot of time. And it’s so cool to run an idea by somebody who has been there and done that, and have them give you a few pointers and save you weeks or months of hashing around.

It seems like a lot of money that we spend on the groups that we are in. And sometimes I wonder when we are paying the bills, if this is worth it? But when we look back on the time that we’ve saved in our own business it is absolutely essential to get some help, so what do I get when I join the Aviation Marketing Master Class.

John Williams You didn’t tell them how to join.

Paula Williams Oh I didn’t tell them how to join. Okay you go to AviationBusinessConsultants.com/class. And, now you’re going to ask, what do I get, right?

John Williams Wait a minute, after you go to class, then what do you do?

Paula Williams Okay. You pick the silver level or above.

So, silver or gold. And, either one of those, we will do our darndest to put together a slam bang campaign for you. With a great list offer and presentation, we’ll design your first advertisements for social media, postcards. Whatever we decide is appropriate, given your situation, your customer set, and, and so on.

Okay, now.

John Williams What do you get when you join? Well here it is.

Paula Williams Okay, what you get when you join is invitations to all of our webinars, podcasts and events. You get recordings, transcripts, templates and examples. We send you our book of the month. We have a private facebook group that we just started a couple of months ago and that’s turned out to be a really big deal.

People are submitting ideas that they are working on and saying, does this headline work or would that headline be stronger? And getting some assistance from each other in the class, which, a lot of you guys have a lot of experience, more than John and I do in some areas.

So, it’s great to have that feedback and that networking opportunity. And you get to associate with the smartest people in the industry and that actually is a pretty cool thing, compared to some of the Mastermind Groups that we’re involved in where you have to kind of adapt. People are in real estate or they’re in other professions and they share examples, and then we have to do the work to adapt it and figure out how to make it work in our industry.

These folks are all in the aviation industry, right?

John Williams Exactly.

Paula Williams Cool, so that’s a pretty good deal. If you joined the master class in November, then of course we will also do a campaign for you or with you. Okay, so this is a special offer and it’s not for everyone.

If you’re already a client, you don’t need to join the master class because you’re already in it, right? You don’t need to join if $279 is gonna take food off your table. This is actually a pretty small amount of money compared to any of the other groups that we’ve looked at.

Right, John?

John Williams Oh yeah.

Paula Williams There’s no travel or anything. And this is not for you if you’re not willing to spend three hours a week or more on marketing which you’re probably already spending if you’re listening to this podcast. You’re probably in a position where you’re required to do that, so this is big enough part of your job that that would be relevant for you.

This is also not for you if you’re not willing to share and help others with great ideas and things like that. This is a group where we are very selective about who we include, and we have asked people to not be included. [LAUGH]

John Williams [LAUGH]

Paula Williams Exactly. There are some folks that, we’ve asked them to do some private client consulting and things like that, and not be involved with the group, because they’re just not the right personality.

We’re very careful with the chemistry of that group, and we wanna make sure it’s a really positive, warm, fun, good experience for everyone. And then also, if you want everything handed to you on a silver platter, then you would be better off with the private consulting and the full service consulting than you would with a master class.

So, fair warning there, this is not for everyone. But if this is for you and if you are a person that is not already a client, but would like to have some of our assistance at a great discount, and you’re willing to do some of the work, and you’re willing to participate, then absolutely we’d love to have you.

So what you do again is you go to aviationbusinessconsultants.com/class. You select silver or gold, when you push that button, a little order form’s gonna pop up, you fill that out and that comes to me. And then you’ll get an email with all of the details and you’ll get a package in the mail once a month, with the CDs, DVDs.

John Williams Transcripts.

Paula Williams Transcripts, paper, [LAUGH] documents, templates and so on. And your book of the month. And it’s not a long term contract, if you ever decide it’s not for you, then we don’t want to have you tied to us or us tied to you any longer than you wanna be.

So it’s a month to month obligation. All right, so thank you for joining us. Hopefully you learned something about the presentation. Once again, a campaign is a list, an offer in the presentation. And this actually finishes up this segment, next month, we’re going to be talking about your editorial calendar.

Since we’re going to be into December, it’ll be time to start planning our 2016 marketing calendar. So we’re gonna start walking through that process with you over four weeks, so we’re gonna start another segment next week. So make sure you subscribe on iTunes so you don’t miss anything.

And please do leave us a review. We’d love to hear what you think, what you’d like to hear more of or less of and other than we’d like to hear more of John and less of Paula.

John Williams No, no, no, no. You know how women are.

Paula Williams [LAUGH]

John Williams They have 50,000 words to get rid of every day and men only have 25,000.

Paula Williams Oh so, you’re looking at this as the opportunity to help me get rid of some of those words, so you don’t have to listen to them.
Yeah.

John Williams Did I say that?

Paula Williams Of course not. Have a great week. I’ll see you next week.